Interactive electronic services, video-on-demand, and the World Wide Web are providing access to an increasing offering of movies, shopping information, games, multimedia documents, electronic commerce and many other services. During the last few years, due mainly to the widespread use of personal computers and the near universal access of millions of users to the World Wide Web, an enormous amount of hypermedia information combining text, images and sounds is accessible via the Internet on the World Wide Web.
While the growth of the Internet as a global medium for communications and commerce has been driven, in part, by the increased availability of personal computers, distributed architecture and a common standard for application development which hides the intricacies of creating the graphical user interfaces from the developer, however, access to the Internet over a personal computer remains limited because consumers must have access to a computer and a working Internet connection.
Wireless access to the Internet over cellular telephones and other handheld devices has the potential to resolve the mobility and Internet connectivity issues presented by Internet access over a personal computer. However, while the number of mobile wireless devices has increased in recent years, display screens on these devices are small and the ability to input information using portable keyboards is constrained, limiting the usability and convenience of this solution. Therefore, the goal of anytime, anywhere access to a wide variety of information services has not yet been fully realized. Accordingly, there exists a need for enhanced online information access.
Even when the public's enthusiasm for new computer-based multimedia services has been seen by many analysts as a threat to the conventional forms of hard-copied publishing, particularly book publishing, the real fact is that, reading a book cannot be compared with reading electronic media. Reading paper remains preferable for most people, whether they are familiar with computers or not. Reading manuals and reports at work, textbooks at school, and menus at restaurants . . . and more generally reading printed material at any time and in any place is part of our daily lives. People can browse very easily through paper catalogs, magazines, newspapers, maps and books by flipping through the pages and by “glancing” at pictures and text. It is also very easy for them to mark and return to specific parts of a physical document.
It is easier and quicker to turn over pages of a book than to browse electronic pages on a computer screen. Many electronic systems attempt to replace paper. These offer, for example, a better access to multimedia services. However, most users prefer to work with paper and it is difficult to foresee, in the near future, a general and massive replacement of paper books by electronic books (e.g. by Web accessible e-books). As reported in an article entitled “Paper is still with us”, by Philippa Jane Benson—The Journal of Electronic Publishing, published by the University of Michigan Press:                “Studies of professionals at work underscore three points that are critical to the design of scientific information: paper isn't going away, reading and writing are inextricably intertwined, and readers sample and navigate text according to specific purposes and tasks”.        
When we compare paper based information with computer based information, paper has a number of useful properties that computers cannot provide. For example:                paper is portable, familiar and can be easily distributed;        paper is easy to read, mark, and manipulate.Notwithstanding the advantages described hereinabove, the most significant problem, of course, with traditional printed publications is that these cannot be changed, amended, updated nor completed. Accordingly, there exists a need for online information access from printed material.        
Despite the Internet's growing acceptance, the telephone network is still more widely and readily accessible. Actually, telephone communications have become a tool of strategic importance. The telephone essentially allows people to communicate and businesses to operate. Everyday, people utilize the telephone system to conduct a broad range of personal and business transactions. Telephones are simple to operate and use the most natural form of communication, the human voice. Access to businesses and public information over the telephone is somewhat easier than access over the Internet because of the greater availability of landline and wireless telephones and the ease of use.
To increase the utility of telephones, a vast array of answering machines, voice mail, interactive voice response, automated call dispatching, forwarding services, and the like have been deployed. Each of these devices or services intends to increase the usefulness of the telephone in a specific way. Businesses have been using telephony based technologies like Interactive Voice Response (hereinafter referred to as “IVR”) systems for communicating with customers and conducting business (e.g. contact centers, telemarketing, help lines, etc.). The proliferation of the wireless phone (i.e. cell phone) has made access to the telephone network even easier. Accordingly, there exists a need for enhanced telephone and online information access.
The widespread use of the Internet and mobile telephony offer many new opportunities to publishers and customers to combine electronic and printed media, i.e. to create “media-adaptive multimedia” products. The philosophy behind the concept of “media-adaptive multimedia” is that information has to be conveyed to customers in a form that is adaptable to their (multimedia) requirements. In fact, today there is a need to enhance traditional printed products with access to digitally stored information, using mobile telephony and voice response systems to access and retrieve information through an electronic network, such as the Internet—i.e. the convergence of printed information, telephony and web access.
To convey information to customers pervasively, in a form suitable to their requirements, new interfaces for accessing information from different media are required. The necessity of using a natural friendly interface for having access to information has been precisely summarized by Ann Light, in the article entitled “Fourteen Users in Search of a Newspaper: the Effect of Expectation on Online Behaviour”, School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, University of Sussex, CSRP 507:                “People expect the friendly familiar paradigm of media to guide them through uncharted territories of information”.        
Previous attempts to coordinate printed matter with external digital objects have used techniques based on optical sensing and decoding of digital data where data has been visibly encoded (e.g. using bar codes), or steganographically encoded using techniques similar to embedding watermarks, subliminal calibration patterns, or the like on the printed medium. Examples of some of these previous attempts can be found in the patents described hereinbelow.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,495,581 entitled “Method and Apparatus for Linking a Document with Associated Reference Information Using Pattern Matching” uses image scanning and pattern matching techniques. This patent discloses an apparatus for linking a portion of a document with associated reference information, wherein the linked portion is designated by a predetermined attribute of the received document image, using inter alia, a device for electronically scanning the electronic representation of the document image to locate said predetermined attribute of the document's image. A main drawback of this system is the need for use of bulky, non portable scanners, not being usable, therefore, in portable, mobile environments.
A similar approach using optical image scanners to access multimedia services is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,640,193 entitled “Multimedia Service Access by Reading Marks on an Object”. This patent discloses an apparatus and a method to enable a user to control the selection of electronic multimedia services using a scanner for reading marks on an object and for communicating a request signal, having an object code representing the read marks, to a user interface.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,903,729 entitled “Method, System, and Article of Manufacture for Navigating to a Resource in an Electronic Network”, discloses a method for navigating on an electronic network. The method comprises the steps of:                forming an electronic image of an object having a plurality of markable regions associated with a plurality of electronic resources;        processing the electronic image to detect which of the markable regions associated with the plurality of electronic resources is marked;        generating a list comprising at least one link to at least one of the electronic resources whose associated markable region is marked, and        displaying a display screen based upon the list.The invention disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,903,729 further requires image scanning and image processing means to read marked regions on hard-copied documents.        
U.S. Pat. No. 5,768,426 entitled “Graphics processing system employing embedded code signals” discloses a system where an identification code signal is impressed on a carrier to be identified (such as an electronic data signal or a physical medium) in a manner that permits the identification signal later to be discerned and the carrier thereby identified.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,905,251 entitled “Hand-held Portable WWW Access Terminal with Visual Display Panel and GUI-based WWW Browser Program Integrated with Bar Code Symbol Reader in a Hand-supportable Housing” discloses a portable hand-held World Wide Web (hereinafter referred to as “WWW”) access terminal for accessing HTML-encoded documents located on the WWW. The terminal includes a bar code symbol reader in a hand-supportable housing for reading URL-encoded symbols specifying the location of HTML-encoded documents stored in information servers connected to the Internet and supporting the TCP/IP standard. This invention requires the marking of physical documents with bar code symbols and requires bar code readers to trigger hyperlinks.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,311,214 entitled “Linking of computers based on optical sensing of digital data” discloses a system where a printed object, such as an item of postal mail, a book, printed advertising, a business card, or a product packaging, is steganographically encoded with plural-bit data. When such an object is presented to an optical sensor, the plural-bit data is decoded and used to establish a link to an internet address corresponding to that object.
Similarly, U.S. Pat. No. 6,408,331 entitled “Computer linking methods using encoded graphics” discloses a system and a method where a data object comprises both a graphic and embedded link information, such as the URL address of a network node, permitting the graphic object to serve as a link usable by an internet browser or the like.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,345,104 entitled “Digital watermarks and methods for security documents” deals with a system where security documents (e.g. passports, currency, event tickets, and the like) are encoded to convey machine-readable multi-bit binary information (e.g. a digital watermark), usually in a manner not alerting human viewers that such information is present. The documents can be provided with overt or subliminal calibration patterns. When a document incorporating such a pattern is scanned (e.g. by a photocopier), the pattern facilitates detection of the encoded information. A commercial product of this class, for embedding a digital watermark in an image, and means of detecting the watermark is provided by the Digimarc® MediaBridge™.
The systems, methods and products described hereinabove have the common drawback of requiring the use of specialized encoding and printing techniques for embedding codes, patterns or watermarks on printed materials, those techniques being non-standard in the printing industry. In fact, the requirement of modifying the original documents by printing coded information affects the integrity or even the readability of documents and represents a fundamental drawback of all these systems. Moreover, the end user must be provided with a specialized interface technology such as digital scanners or optical sensors for locating, sensing and decoding embedded information from publications printed using these techniques.
Based upon the analysis provided hereinabove of the different systems proposed heretofore for identifying, locating and accessing digital objects from printed matter, it would be a significant improvement to provide the possibility to access information related with items printed on a physical document, anytime and anywhere, directly from the same physical document, eliminating the need of requiring the use of specialized encoding and printing techniques for embedding codes, patterns or watermarks on the printed materials, and the need of using scanners or code readers for capturing and decoding said codes, patterns or watermarks identifying such information, while preventing errors and mistakes due to the manual capture of the coding of such items.
Accordingly, there is a need for systems and methods for improving printed texts with telephonically accessible, electronically stored data. In particular, there is a need for a system utilizing a telephone-based user interface capable of retrieving from the Web, and delivering to users, information related to items printed on physical documents.